Notes and Essays -- John Brown

By Reuters  February 3, 2026  2:11 PM EST  Updated 6 hours ago  , opens new tab Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy listens to U.S. President Donald Trump, after Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed willingness to help Ukraine "succeed", during a press conference at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 28, 2025.  REUTERS /Jonathan Ernst/File Photo  Purchase Licensing  Rights Feb   3  (Reuters)    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Ukraine was waiting for U.S. reaction to Russia's overnight attack on his country's cities that caused further damage to Ukraine's energy infrastructure. "We expect a response from the United States to the Russian strikes. It was America's proposal to stop strikes on energy infrastructure during diplomat efforts and the cold winter period," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.   Zelenskiy said Ukraine had been ...

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 Explaining Ukraine Kate Tsurkan The Kyiv Independent ,  February 3   What does it mean to be Ukrainian? It's the kind of question that sounds simple until you try to answer it. The bureaucratic definition is straightforward enough: owning a Ukrainian passport, speaking the Ukrainian language, a line on your birth certificate indicating some Ukrainian city or village… But citizenship is also something more profound — a set of emotional commitments, a willingness to defend something beyond yourself, perhaps even a readiness to die for it. Where does the legal category end and the existential one begin? Welcome to this week’s issue of Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan, the Kyiv Independent’s culture newsletter. [JB italicks not in text] I've been thinking about this question of what it means to be Ukrainian more now that Ukraine has passed the law on dual citizenship under specific conditions. After nearly a decade of living here, I'm eligible to a...

In Russia’s remotest province Kamchatka, residents walk about town through tunnels carved out of massive snowdrifts. It is like a garden maze only made of packed snow because no one thought of installing any road signs. Image from Quora

Alan Cottrill inspects the golden statue of President Trump that he designed in Zanesville, Ohio. Credit... Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 71 missiles and 450 drones into the country overnight, of which 38 missiles and 412 drones were shot down or suppressed. Twenty-seven missiles and 31 drones impacted across 27 locations, the air force said . Moscow's latest overnight barrage came amid temperatures as low as -14 By David Brennan, ABC News , February 3, 2026, 6:46 AM; see also and also LONDON -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged "maximum pressure" on Russia from the international community after Moscow fired hundreds of drones and missiles into Ukraine overnight into Tuesday morning, in a major attack that Zelenskyy said focused on the country's  critical energy infrastructure . The strike was the largest reported by the Ukrainian air force of the year so far, and the largest overall number of munitions launched in a single night since the night of Dec. 27.   The number of missiles fired on Monday night was also unusually high, and the largest to...